Read It In Books:Nothing If Not Critical.

"Where works of art are rare, rarity itself is a value; it is only when they are common that one can learn their intrinsic worth" - Goethe.

"Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?" ("What shall I love if not the enigma?") - Giorgio de Chirico

"The life of the creative man is led, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. It is also one of the most difficult, because the amusement always has to be newer and on a higher level. So we are on a kind of spiral. The higher you go, the narrower the circle. As you go ahead the field of choice becomes more meagre, in terms of self-entertainment. In the end, working is good because it is the last refuge of the man who wants to be amused. Not everything that amused me in the past amuses me so much any more" - Saul Steinberg.

Giorgio de Chirico - Metaphysical Interior (1917)

Robert Hughes' book of art criticism Nothing If Not Critical has been looking out at me from my creaking bookshelves for some years now. It's not so much that it's unloved, I regularly peruse individual essays for art research, so much as I've never fully committed to it.

On 9th May 2018 that all changed when I decided to read the thing in its entirety. Essays devoted to over eighty different artists stretching from 'Ancestors' like Hans Holbein, Caravaggio, and Goya to the 'Nineteenth Century' (Degas, Whistler, and Pissarro) and on to 'Contemporaries' like Sean Scully, Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer), along the way stopping off to take in 'Americans' (Warhol, Pollock, and Rothko), 'Europeans' (Picasso, Magritte, Kandinsky), and a section titled 'Into Modernism' which covers artists such as Rodin, Manet, and Gauguin.

That's just a few names in a book that proved to be a mammoth, but worthwhile, undertaking. While I've enjoyed the television shows of Andrew Graham Dixon, Waldemar Januszczak, and James Fox I'd been led to believe, mainly by my friend Neill. that Robert Hughes knocks them all into a cocked hat, and as Neill is one of the people that opened me up to the wide world of art (I'd dabbled with Dali and others before but Neill showed me how much wider, and how much more available, the world of art was to me) I take his opinions pretty seriously.

Salvador Dali - Sleep (1937)

Hughes was born in Australia in 1938 and became best known for being TIME magazine's art critic and for his 1980 documentary series The Shock of the New in which he looked at how modern art had developed since the days of Impressionism and how modern technology had played a role in that. Nothing If Not Critical came out eleven years later in 1991 and kicks off with an introduction called The Decline of the City of Mahagonay which tells the story of how the centre of the art world shifted from Paris and Rome to New York in the post-war years and then to - nowhere at all!

It takes in the Abstract Expressionists, the Pop Artists, the invention of photography and television, Baudelaire, Karl Marx, the critic Clement Greenberg, the Cultural Cringe, and Hughes' own upbringing in Australia before castigating the eighties (then only months gone) for that decade's "cycle of gorge and puke", "driven consumption", and "the victory of promotion over connoisseurship". All signed, sealed, and delivered under the aegis of "the glitzy triumphalism of Reagan's presidency".

Artists like David Salle, Gilbert & George, and, most of all, Julian Schnabel are sneered at as emblematic of all that was wrong with those times/is wrong with our times. An inflated market and an inflated sense of self worth makes of the contemporary art world an ouroboros, an irrelevance to all but a small coterie of invited delegates clinking champagne flutes and scoffing vol-au-vents behind a velvet rope in a soulless upmarket hotel bar.

Hughes goes on to compare the hobnobbing milquetoasts of his era with artists like Courbet who threw his lot in with the radical left and was even blamed (unjustly writes Hughes) for toppling the Vendome Column. In a memorable line he writes, of Courbet and his fellow travellers, that "they may have been wrong but at least they were decently wrong" and he sees the problem from a linear perspective. Art, in the world of mass media and shorter attention spans, no longer has primacy. In 1989, it's said the average American spent half of his or her conscious life watching television. How much time did they spend in galleries do you think?

Gustave Courbet - Burial at Ornans (1849)

In its attempt to keep up with the instant gratifications provided by mass media, Hughes posits that art had lost its way, had forgotten what it was for. He singles out artists like Robert Longo, John Heartfield, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer for particular opprobrium on this front. They eschewed cultural vitality for the market (run, in Hughes' words, by "finance manipulators, fashion victims and rich ignoramuses"). They made art for the galleries and not for the people. To put it bluntly, they sold out.

That wonderful essay is just the introduction to the book. Hughes shows us how we got here and what we lost along the way. The first of many fine essays (most originally printed in Time of The New York Review of Books) dedicated to individual artists is given over to Hans Holbein, "one of the best minds of the Northern Renaissance" and a man, Hughes predicts, that nobody will ever surpass in their drawing of the human face.

Hans Holbein - The Ambassadors (1533)

Caravaggio - Supper at Emmaus (1601)

Praise, too, is given to Caravaggio ("one of the hinges of art history:there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same"), Chardin (by general consensus "one of the supreme artists of the eighteenth century and probably the greatest master of still life in the history of painting"), and, of course, Picasso ("the most prodigally gifted artist of the twentieth century" - reasonable enough). George Stubbs is called "the best horse painter that ever lived", Poussin "the greatest French artist of the seventeenth century", Constable and Turner "define the supreme achievements of landscape painting in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century", and Thomas Eakins is "the greatest realist painter America has so far produced". Lee Krasner's work is, quite simply, "intensely moving". 

Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin - Basket of Wild Strawberries (c.1761)

Lee Krasner - Cobalt Night (1962)

Van Gogh's paintings, the ones he made just before he took his own life, are "the stuff of the most powerful legend of suffering and transcendence in modern art", Morandi's tins and bottles "vaguely recall the towers of Bologna or San Gimignano", Arshile Gorky was "of inestimable significance to modern art in America", Anselm Kiefer has "an unmistakable grandeur of symbolic vision", David Hockney is "a painter of strong talent and indefatigable industry", and Howard Hodgkin's "talent as colorist" was "unsurpassed" by any other painter of his time. Goya is given one of the longest entries and this reflects Hughes unending admiration for his work. Goya, writes Hughes, "speaks to us with an urgency that no artist of our time can muster", his Third of May "excites our pity and terror as no other painting of war has done", his work informs Guston and Motherwell and comparisons with Goya 'scared' Picasso!

Arshile Gorky - The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1944)

Francisco Goya - The Third of May 1808 (1814)

Less favourably received are the likes of Gilbert & George (their work dismissed as "pederastic banalities"), the later work of Marc Chagall (he painted "nothing but cloying ethnic kitsch" for the last thirty years of his life), and Thomas Hart Benton ("flat-out, lapel grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle").

It is said of Sandro Chia, a minor artist who Hughes warned, correctly, could be in major difficulty, that when "he paints a crocodile, you suspect the model was a handbag" and the 'pathetic' Jean-Michel Basquiat (an artist I like very much and have written to say so) gets an essay dedicated to him subtitled "Requiem for a Featherweight". Ouch!

Despite the essay wonderfully, and correctly, skewering the "racist idea of the black as the naif and the rhythmic innocent", and the slightly more questionable belief that Basquiat's admirers saw him as "an urban noble savage" and his death as a shrewd career move, Hughes' contentions that Basquiat was "absurdly overrated" hasn't aged as well as that idea of Sandro Chia's 'major difficulty'. Basquiat's work has grown in both popularity and critical appraisal in the ensuing decades. The same cannot be said of all artists who have invoked the wrath of Hughes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat - Untitled (1982)

The essay on Julian Schnabel is particularly interesting. It begins with Hughes taking himself out of Schnabel's memoirs after Schnabel had written that Hughes's request for Schnabel to chain him up had been denied. Schnabel went on to write that Hughes had responded with "antisemetic (sic) babbling and personal attacks". Hughes goes on to deny ever having met Schnabel, disses his poor spelling, and then makes a very strong case for him being both a fraud and a braggart.

Which isn't difficult when Schnabel himself describes his memoirs as "a cross between Charles Dickens and Gertrude Stein". It doesn't even seem to come from a place of rancour, or at least not entirely - you'd be pissed off if someone you'd never met accused you of propositioning them, when Hughes describes Schnabel as "megalomaniac" with a "painfully sincere belief in his own present genius and future historical importance" and soon Hughes moves away from castigating Schnabel as the mediocrity he believed him to be and casts his net further to denounce hype sodden culture of eighties America and the New York money men and shysters who put that mediocrity on a pedestal. Those who fell for the bluster. Those who fell in line behind a bully. Maybe the fact that Schnabel ended up painting an album cover for the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be the ultimate mark of the man. A mediocre artist paints a mediocre sleeve for a mediocre band.

There are fantastic and bizarre stories about Caravaggio cutting open a waiter's face in a "squabble about artichokes", George Stubbs painting a lemur sent to London as a gift for George III from a former governor-general of Madras, Norman Rockwell hypnotising chickens, Nam June Paik dragging a violin along a sidewalk by a string like a "scraped and protesting pet", Guido Reni abstaining from sex due to a fear of women being witches , and Marcel Proust purloining one of Whistler's gloves after his death for a souvenir.

Norman Rockwell - Painting The Little House (1921)

The story of Giorgio de Chirico is bizarre, not because of surreal anecdotes but because of the strange career turn he made in his early thirties. When he turned his back on the 'metaphysical' painting that inspired Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Grosz, and countless others and aimed to became a classicist, an "heir of Titian", and spent the last six decades of his life producing unremarkable dross.

Other artists are even less fortunate. We read about Emile Zola and Claude Monet carrying Edouard Manet's fifty-one year old syphilitic corpse to the grave, how Henri Rousseau proudly wore a violet rosette sent to him as a decoration in error by the French military for the rest of his life, and the story of Arshile Gorky's life and death is so notorious that if you don't know it yet I won't depress you now. Hughes is not sparing when he describes Rothko's suicide:- "he lay, fat and exsanguinated, clad in long underwear and black socks, in the middle of a lake of blood".

Henri Rousseau - The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (1905)

More peculiarly, we're entertained by George Grosz relating how he once witnessed Oskar Kokoschka gnawing on the "fresh and bloody bone of an ox" at a ball in Berlin. Kokoschka also had a life sized effigy of his former lover made which he dressed up, went to bed with, and eventually murdered!

Some essays are less about individual artists and more about eras and movements. One, France in the Golden Age, covers 17c artists like Nicolas Poussin and Georges de la Tour (as well as writers like Moliere and Racine) and touches on the idea that great art often thrives under terrible, ruthless leaders - in this case Louis XIV, the Sun King. The section devoted to English Art in the Twentieth Century makes a case for the greatness of Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Frank Auerbach, and, most of all, the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis whilst, I think correctly, decrying the "weak pastiches" of Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry's snobby Bloomsbury set.

Paul Nash - Landscape From a Dream (1936-1938)

Frank Auerbach - Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning (2004)

There's another on German Romanticism that takes in Caspar David Friedrich ("soaked in allegory"), Lovis Corinth, and Philipp Otto Runge who is described as "perhaps the closest equivalent to William Blake that Germany produced". Yet another, on Futurism, remarks on how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (the self styled 'caffeine of Europe') became a prototype for avant-garde promoters by understanding how newspapers wanted to run stories about weirdos doing weird things rather than "virtuously tolerant reviews" of modern art before going on to show how that movement, along with the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis, took from, and adapted, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.

There's a couple of intriguing essays that are neither, specifically, about individuals, movements, or eras. Deco and Fins assesses a Brooklyn Museum show of bullet nosed locomotives, jumpsuits, aerofoils, and architectural models of skyscrapers. "Everything is streamlined, even objects that are screwed down and cannot move, so that America's breathless rush towards utopia is clearly signified". It's the last word in retrofuturism.

Other essays see Hughes warming to his favourite themes of slagging of the neo-geo arts scene of eighties NYC and chastising the bankers and money men who purchased, and in doing so elevated and promoted, that work. Ever eager to show that he's far more knowledgeable than them, Hughes is never afraid of, and in fact relishes, a literary reference. Throughout the course of the book we run into Balzac, Baudelaire, Voltaire, Mallarme, Proust, Walter Benjamin, and Montaigne. Although when Flaubert, in defence of modernity and what was seen as the debasement of language, wrote that "contemporary ideas must be expressed using the appropriate crude terms" I wondered if Hughes agreed.

Some of Hughes' turns of phrase are exquisite, painting pictures as vivid as the artists he waxes lyrical about in your mind's eye. An excited Whistler prances about "like a peahen on hot bricks", de Chirico's 'city' is one of "the capitals of the modernist imagination", Jackson Pollock is a "harsh, barely articulate existentialist from the West, full of chaotic energy and anal aggression", and an essay on Toulouse-Lautrec suggests "the stream of life is divided into an infinity of fleeting moments".

James Abbott McNeill Whistler - Red and Pink:The Little Mephisto (c.1884)

Jackson Pollock - Autumn Rhythm (1950)

Edward Hopper "sensed, but did not agonize over, a profound solitude, a leaning towards Thanatos that lay below American optimism", Warhol climbed "from face to face in a silent delirium of snobbery", Francis Bacon was "an utterly compelling painter who will die without heirs", and, amusingly, Rene Magritte's life was so ordinary that "by the standards of Surrealist bohemia and Surrealist chic, he might as well have been a grocer".

Edward Hopper - The Martha McKean of Wellfleet (1944)

With all this verbosity it was no surprise that, as ever,  I had to reach for the dictionary more than a few times:- adumbrated, agonic, aleatory, alizarin, appurtenance, autophagy, bilk, bolus, borborygym, boscage, carceral, catamite, clyster, coeval, colophon, contropposto, corybantic, cynosure, damozel, demimondaine, demotic, descant, dinkus, donnee, dropsical, elecampane, entasis, epicene, expiatory, feuilleton, fixity, fugleman, fulgid, goyim, gueridon, hierophant, imbrication, labile, limned, lineament, macaronic, ophidian, orrery, ort, pasquinade, poetaster, positivistic, prebendary, prolixity, quatrefoil, retardataire, sublunary, tambour, thaumaturgic, swatch, and, perhaps best of all, steatopygous being a few examples. Apotropaic, chthonic, exequy, haptic, hieratic, hortatory, integument, oneiric, panegryic, and rodomontade crop up more than once.

But it wasn't just new words I learned. Or even facts about artists and paintings that I'd been hitherto unaware of. I learned, I think, what it is to put together sentences and paragraphs that express one's true feelings about those artists and paintings. How to be truthful to one's self in one's writing and to not feel cowed into following the herd and their opinions. I could never wish to be half the writer Robert Hughes was but by reading Nothing If Not Critical I feel I have, and will, improve as a writer myself. As an exequy to him I present this panegryic.

Theatre night:Blood Wedding.

"That boy will come to a bad end. The blood's no good" - The Father.

My main concern, initially, on attending Marina Carr's adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's 1932 tragedy Blood Wedding (or Bodas de Sangre in its original Spanish) at the Young Vic was getting through the nearly two hour running time (no interval) without needing a wee. The view from the cheap seats was fine but no readmittance was allowed so the play would have to be enthralling enough to distract me from my impatient bladder.

Luckily, for the most part, it was. It's well acted, it's well scripted, and it's thoughtful although, disappointingly, I never felt any huge emotional engagement with any of the characters or any of the action. I was never particularly invested and as the story worked its way towards what was always clearly going to be a tragic outcome, even if we couldn't be sure who for, I found I wasn't really bothered.

I wasn't rooting for anyone. I'm not sure I was supposed to be. Carr, a Dubliner by birth, has transported the setting from Lorca's Spain to a rural Ireland (it's all set on 'the mountain') of horses, poverty, and some remarkably old fashioned male attitudes. The story tells of a young man and his impending marriage to a young woman (the characters are rarely given names), that young woman's uncertainty about this union, her fiery affair with Leonardo Felix, and the groom's mother's complete and utter hatred for Felix and his family following a blood feud many many years ago.

A feud the younger characters say should be left in the past but one the older generation, the mother especially, refuse to let go of. The action revolves around the groom and his mother meeting his future wife's family. Leonardo's unhappy relationship with his pregnant wife, and there's also three characters of colour who sing a kind of Greek chorus between scenes, the two male 'choristers' carrying axes for no apparent reason.

They're also put to use moving the scenery and I couldn't help think that it seemed rather superfluous to the action. At least, that is, until near the end when their reason for being there was revealed. It was one of many things that took a while to make sense. At least to me. I'm slow on the uptake at the best of times.

The constant talk of knives had me thinking of the theory of Chekhov's gun and how plays should not make false promises. The red thread an unnamed weaver woman passes through her hands, of course, stands in for blood and its spilling but it also represents a yarn. One weaved and one told. The horses that were oft-mentioned seemed, initially, like somewhat cliched mise-en-scene, almost as if The Rubberbandits had been tasked with stage design. but, again, proved pertinent to the script.

It was all very clever and there's the rub. Perhaps it was just a little too clever. Maybe Marina Carr had tried to combine too many elements and this undoubtedly rich vein of complex intertwined narratives and symbols felt more like a puzzle to solve than a story to savour. Much as I love to have to do a bit of work when I go to the theatre (or cinema, or art gallery), even more so I like to feel something.

But I didn't cry, I wasn't ever scared, and I only laughed once - and even then a brief titter rather than a proper PMSL (which, bearing in mind my earlier observance on the lengthy running time was probably for the best). The cast are all great. David Walmsley's kind hearted, if naive and unworldly, groom does a fantastic job of portraying the vengeance of a cuckolded man who's had his pride dented and his heart broken while Olwen Fouere as his mother, or Whistler's mother judging by her outfit, has just the right amount of acidity you'd expect from a woman who's allowed a feud to consume decades of her life.

Brid Brennan as the Weaver gets her teeth into the spookiest role of the play, Thalissa Teixeira as the Moon (really) has a great voice and even gets to do a little stunt, and Gavin Drea as Leonardo Felix gets to show off his, admittedly impressive, pecs more often than seemed necessary while also spinning round in circles and gliding in the air. He's the horny handed son of the soil and though his character seems sent straight from central casting he pulls it off with no little panache.

Best of all, for me, is Aoife Duffin who, as the Bride, takes a while to assert her authority in this culture of male dominance. It seems likely she'll be punished if she follows her heart and she'll be punished if she follows her head so, on realising this, she makes a decision that causes outrage to many and then qualifies that decision with a feminist reasoning that seems decades ahead of its time.

As the whole thing moves towards its dramatic conclusion, things do really ramp up towards the end, I couldn't help feeling that if Blood Wedding had been edited down to about two thirds of its length it might have worked better. They say revenge is a dish best served cold (though I think the maxim 'living well is the best revenge' serves humanity better) but theatre should always be served warm. The action in Blood Wedding felt like it had been left to simmer a bit too long. Good rather than great.

It's Not New and It's Not a River:A Walk Along the New River.

Crayfish! I'd been worried that my tenth London by Foot walk would be a bit dull in comparison to others. I'd also been concerned that the weather may not be great and that people might not show up.

So when the sun came out, six lovely people rocked up in Palmers Green, and we'd seen a crayfish within the first half hour I felt pretty pleased. I'm not saying that the many crayfish (including one bionic one) we encountered en route, or even the heron, was the best thing of the day (that's the company, it's always the company) but they certainly gave the whole experience something unique. I'd certainly never seen a live crayfish before.

It's Not New And It's Not A River:A Walk Along The New River commenced, for some of us, at 11am in Morrisons Cafe. The glitz. The glamour. To the soundtrack of Alvin and The Chipmunks and The Cure (an eclectic mix for sure) Pam, Shep, and myself tucked into mega cheap veggie breakfasts (£3.80) and cups of tea. A good start to the day only slightly undone by the lady who vacated the toilet I was hoping to use with a curt "I'd leave it five minutes if I were you".

Michelle and Marianne had been intending to join us for brunch but instead had done a 5K park run - in Finsbury Park - where we were heading later! Dena was running a bit late but it wasn't long before we headed out of Palmers Green, on Green Lanes (not for the last time of the day, it's a long road), turned past an architecturally pleasing library and down a set of stairs to the New River Path.

Palmers Green has the largest population of Greek Cypriots outside of Cyprus. They even call it Palmers Greek or Little Cyprus. One non-Cypriot resident of note was Joe Strummer of The Clash.

We nearly lost one of our walkers before we'd even left Palmers Greek! Michelle was cramping up following that park run and wasn't sure she'd be able to carry on. Shep pulled a packet of Feminax out of his pocket (!) and that seemed to, for the most part, ease the pain and Michelle carried on with us with just the occasional moment of doubt. A phone message from her daughter, Evie, saying "you can do it, mummy" as inspirational as the Feminax was medicinal no doubt.

Not everyone in the borough of Enfield is so happy as 'Fuck U' and 'no smiling' graffiti testifies. Perhaps they'd experienced the pubs of Enfield as we did back on the London LOOP last December! The New River path, once you get past the graffiti and discarded lager cans, provides a much more pleasant aspect.

The joke about the New River not being new or a river is said to be as old as the waterway itself - but that can't be true - because the joke wouldn't have worked when the 'river' actually was new. Pedantry aside, the history of it is that it's an artificial waterway that opened in 1613 to provide fresh drinking water, taken from the Lea, to London. Which it still does. The water is very clear and has been found to be London's purest!

It runs twenty miles from Hertfordshire to the reservoirs near Finsbury Park which we'd eventually reach. In 1602, Edmund Colthurst (a landowner who inherited Bath Abbey) obtained a charter from James I (James VI of Scotland) to build it but it was Hugh Myddleton who most credit with construction. There are streets along the route named for him.

Myddleton was a Welsh cloth maker, goldsmith, banker, and engineer. There's a statue of him on Islington Green (which we'd not be seeing on this walk). In 1619 (so happy 400th birthday) the New River Company was founded and it became a penal offense to throw rubbish or carrion in the river. Washing clothes or planting willows or elm trees within five yards of its banks would incur the 'king's displeasure' - which makes it sound worth doing.

The husband of the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Rochemont Barbauld - a minister of the Newington Green Unitarian Church, is said to have gone violently insane, attacked his wife, and drowned himself in the river and in Charles Lamb's 1823 collection, Essays of Elia, he talks of a friend who walked into the river by accident, possibly the blind poet George Dyer, who then 'disappeared'.

We were fortunate to not witness any drownings. Instead we admired the beautifully coloured leaves hanging in the autumn sun, Michelle spotted a large rat outside some kind of ranch that had a Santa AND a 666 on the front door, before spotting our first crayfish. Living nearer to the countryside has given this girl an eye for the wildlife.

We observed the crayfish for a while, as we did the geese, and we crossed Pymmes Brook, a minor tributary of the Lea that has come from Monken Hadley before running beneath the New River and joining the Lea at Tottenham Lock. Occasionally crossing roads and observing some local youth looking suspicious, we followed a brief diversion on the roads of an estate as the river dipped underground, looked at herons, mushrooms, and model dinosaurs in a kid's playground, and also stopped to admire a stone clad church.

From there we crossed the railway lines (bridge surprisingly, and remarkably, free of graffiti) into the grounds of Alexandra Park. I've seen both Franz Ferdinand and LCD Soundsystem at Ally Pally. You may well have been to a gig there too. It's a fairly steep walk up to the top but the views are worth it.

Alexandra Park is laid out on the site of Tottenham Wood and named after Alexandra of Denmark who, in 1863, married the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII (reign:1901-1910). They used to have deer and horse racing in the park but now a lake of waterfowl is as good as you get. Which, for Shep, is very good.

Alexandra Palace was opened in 1875 and the architects behind it were Owen Jones (who'd helped Joseph Paxton with Crystal Palace), John Johnson (Church of St Edward the Confessor, Romford), and Alfred Meeson who helped Charles Barry with the Houses of Parliament. It was intended as a north London counterpart to the Crystal Palace and was conceived as 'the Palace of the People' by Owen Jones.

It was where the first regular high definition television service was broadcast, by the BBC, in 1936 and has also been home to the Great British Beer Festival (1977-1980), the Brits (1993-1995), the PCC World Darts Championship (2008 onwards), and Masters Snooker (2012 onwards). April 1967 saw the Technicolour Dream with Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and in January 1985 the Sinclair C5 was launched here. I'd not want to go down the hill on one.

It was also home to the Dutch team during the 2012 Olympics. A team that went on to win six golds in swimming, sailing, field hockey, gymnastics, and, most memorably, cycling for Marianne Vos. We took in the panoramic views (as far as Crystal Palace neatly enough) and slowly descended, feeling better for the mountain air! Or was that just me?

Past what looked like a stegosaurus or an ankylosaurus in a playground, briefly through a housing estate, and back to another, barely used, section of the New River Path. I think we saw as many dogs as people.

We eventually came out, not exactly where I'd expected, near the top of Harringay Passage so I realised a life long dream and walked down it. It's over a mile long and, truth be told, there's not much to see. I thought it might be a haven of illegal drinking dens and shebeens or reminiscent of a souk. Or perhaps the streets would be lined with clowns, musicians, and street entertainers of every stripe. Alas not. It was a long, not unpleasant yet not eventful, walk to the end. Still, done it now.

It was thirsty work and at the end people were ready for a pub stop so after a brief visit to Finsbury Park (which the New River flows through and in which we ended up walking a path that Michelle and Marianne had run on just that morning) we finally made that pub stop.

The Finsbury was a nice pub. Apparently a lot better than it used to be. I only managed one drink but some of my thirstier walkers got a couple down. It was good to see everyone getting along but I had to crack the whip and insist we moved on. Firm but fair, that's me!

I'm really not that firm at all. The next stretch looped round back to almost where we'd come from but it was possibly the most glorious. Fulgid and fetching rays of sun poked through the trees and we saw a young lad lobbing a crayfish back in the river. Chimneys and art spaces laid out before us on the far bank, mud beneath our feet on our bank. But, despite the legend KISS MY ARSE decorating a bridge, it was somewhat beautiful.

After we'd crossed Seven Sisters Road we reached the reservoirs where the New River once ended (there's a brief extenstion now). Constructed in 1833, the West Reservoir is now a leisure facility for sailing, yachting, and canoeing and the East River seems to have been given over to wildlife.

It's very beautiful and hard to imagine you're essentially in Finsbury Park. The new tower blocks being built for the super rich are clearly desirable residencies and will be clearly out of the price range of relative paupers like us. Still, good to have a nose. There's a fantastic climbing centre (which we'd spied from Clissold Park on one of our cemetery walks) in a converted pumping station that was designed in a castellated style by Robert Billings under the supervision of William Chadwell Mylne (Blackfriars Bridge, the first one, and beaten to the design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge by Isambard Kingdom Brunel) between 1854 and 1856.

After that and some brief fannying around near some water sculptures it was time for another pit stop. For some reason we sat outside in the Brownswood where we discussed the relative merits of Discos and Feminax, it was that kind of day, before setting off again through Clissold Park and down a road full of wonderful Grand Designs type houses. It was getting dark so the photos may not do them justice.

When we reached Newington Green it was all over bar the shouting. We stopped again in the Lady Mildmay pub where Michelle generously provided bread, dips, and pimientos de padron (yes) and Dena managed to resist temptation so she shouldn't spoil her appetite for later. Here, Marianne's husband Chris joined us and, after a drink, we followed the darkened last piece of the New River Path down to Upper Street. Studiously ignoring a large packet of gelatine!

Newington Green, which straddles the boroughs of Islington and Hackney, is where, in the 17c, Samuel Pepys was sent by his mum for fresh air. In the 16c, Henry VIII hunted bulls, stags and boar in the area when it was still a forest. Sir Walter Mildway was Elizabeth I's chancellor (he also founded Emmanuel College in Cambridge) and his grandson Henry Mildmay was an MP and Charles I's Master of the Jewel House.

The pub is, of course, named after the Mildmay family. Henry Mildmay disagreed with the king's religious policies and supported Cromwell in the Civil War so after the Restoration he was, of course, arrested for his part in regicide. Surprisingly spared the death penalty he was sent to the Tower of London and imprisoned for life. During the 17c the area became home of the English Dissenters movement. It was just an agricultural village at the time.

I was hoping to treat my fellow walkers to a brief tour of Canonbury (the Estorick Collection, Basil Spence's house, The Compton Arms or Canonbury Tavern - maybe some history on George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Dido, Barbra Castle, Spider Stacey, Cate Blanchett, Keira Knightley, Stella Rimington, and other Canonbury residents of yore) but time was against us. It was dark and people were getting hungry.

Upper Street on Saturday night is for couples or people who have booked so, once Michelle, Marianne, and Chris had hopped on a bus home, the four remaining LbFers made our way on to Holloway Road for a perfectly decent curry and a couple of Cobras in the Standard Tandoori. Dena departed and Shep, Pam, and I moved on to The Famous Cock Tavern and we all agreed that it'd been another successful day out.

I was relieved, I still, somehow, felt full of energy, and I was touched by how beautiful London can be if you look at it the right way. I was even more touched by spending a day with such a wonderful group of friends. Thanks to Pam, Michelle, and Shep for the photos and thanks to all for coming. LbF will return between Xmas and New Year with a William Blake walk on Saturday December 28th but before that there's the small matter of rounding out the TADS season on November 2nd south of the river. Last year it got messy.